6 Horrible Aftermaths Implied by Movies With Happy Endings

#3. Collateral -- The Hero is Now on a Drug Kingpin's Hit List

Dreamworks/Paramount

In Collateral, Jaime Foxx (Booty Call) plays a cab driver named Max who winds up being held hostage by his latest fare, a professional hitman named Vincent, played by Tom Cruise (Rock of Ages) in a Don Johnson suit and a powdered Schwarzenegger haircut. Vincent forces Max to drive him around town so that he can spend the night assassinating four material witnesses and one prosecuting attorney involved in an upcoming indictment against a drug kingpin named Felix, because the screenwriter was terrible at naming his characters.

Dreamworks/Paramount"Quick! You need to take me to go kill Bob, Bill, Joe, and Rutherford!"

Vincent kills all four of the witnesses who were scheduled to testify against Felix, but before he can assassinate the prosecutor (played by Jada Pinkett-Smith, star of Woo), Max decides to fight back and kills Vincent, leaving his dead ass slumped motionlessly in an elevated train car like a drunk Beefeater trying to solve a word problem written on the top of his shoe.

Dreamworks/ParamountReally, more movies should end with Tom Cruise being dead.

The Horrific Aftermath:

Vincent may be dead once the credits roll, but you know who totally isn't dead at all? Felix the Vincent-hiring drug kingpin, who presumably still doesn't want to be indicted.

Dreamworks/ParamountAlso, Felix is played by Javier Bardem, so Max is really fucked.

Even though Vincent was killed, he still managed to eliminate all four of the witnesses subpoenaed for Felix's indictment. Sure, the prosecutor survived, but she was technically the least important person on Felix's hit list -- if she doesn't have any witnesses, she can't put together much of a case against him. So Felix probably won't be going to prison anytime soon.

Unless Max the cab driver testifies about his adventure running murder-errands with Vincent. And since Max was forced to impersonate Vincent in a meeting with Felix, Felix knows exactly what Max looks like.

Somebody is eventually going to find Vincent's body on that train, and once that happens, it won't take Felix too long to learn that Max was an impostor and is the only person left alive who could possibly testify against him. After all, he managed to obtain detailed information about all of the other witnesses against him, so how long is it going to take for him to track down Max the sad, lonely cab driver? Even if Max somehow makes it to trial and his testimony puts Felix away for life, that doesn't mean he's in the clear. We've seen enough '80s movies to know that a guy like Felix can (and almost certainly will) have Max hunted down and thrown into a shark aquarium from inside his jail cell.

Dreamworks/ParamountLesson of the day: Don't give weird, gray-haired Tom Cruise a ride, no matter how many bills he flashes.

No matter how you look at it, Max is going to be living the rest of his life drenched in paranoid terror sweat unless he gets massive reconstructive face surgery and changes his name to Fletcher or something.

#2. Jurassic Park III -- Flying Dinosaurs Are Unleashed on the Population

Universal

In Jurassic Park III, a 12-year old boy gets stranded on Dinosaur Island, and his parents hire Dr. Alan Grant to lead them on a rescue mission, because apparently even Jeff Goldblum thought this dumbass kid wasn't worth saving. They go to the island and find the kid living in a tube with a bottle full of tyrannosaurus pee, narrowly avoid getting killed by a bunch of dinosaurs that somehow look worse than the ones in the original film, and finally stumble out onto the beach in the middle of a full-scale U.S. military invasion force.

UniversalSo uh, why didn't these army guys just save the kid in the first place?

Instead of waging war against the prehistoric beasts, which would have been the greatest moment in cinematic history, Dr. Grant and the others are just quickly ushered onto a helicopter and the movie abruptly ends, leaving us with at least 30 minutes to spend feeling betrayed in the lobby while we wait for our parents to come pick us up.

Comstock/Photos.comLook what you've done to the collective inner-child of every person who grew up in the '90s, Jurassic Park III.

The Horrific Aftermath:

As the movie concludes, some Pteranodons are shown flying around the departing helicopters:

UniversalAnd yet, for some reason, the army guys still aren't shooting at them.

That's because earlier in the movie, our heroes were trapped in the Jurassic Park aviary with the winged monsters. They managed to escape with their lives but left the damn gate open in their panic.

UniversalIf you set your vicious pterodactyl free and it doesn't return, it was never yours to begin with.

That aviary cage was built for the specific purpose of keeping giant dinosaurs from flying across the Pacific and scooping some hapless bastard right off of a Nicaraguan boardwalk. Isla Sorna, the fictitious island where the movie takes place, is only 207 miles away from mainland Central America. Those time-displaced super predators probably won't have too much trouble flapping their giant leathery death wings over that kind of distance, which they are now clearly free to do.

It would be one thing if this ending was treated as an ominous cliffhanger to set up another sequel, but it isn't, at all. Dr. Grant spots the dinosaurs himself, and instead of telling the nearest military man to blast the pteranodons out of the sky with every ounce of modern technology currently at their disposal, he casually remarks that they're probably looking for new nesting grounds. Despite this being the most terrifying news ever delivered (that news being "prehistoric slaughter machines are on their way to a major population center"), one of the other characters makes a joke about it, and everyone laughs.

UniversalTo be fair, William H. Macy's mustache is fairly hilarious.

After what happened at the end of The Lost World, you'd think everyone involved would be a little more concerned about a flock of dinosaurs making their way to the coastal Americas.

#1. Minority Report -- A Horde of Murderers Flood the Streets

Dreamworks/20th Century Fox

In Minority Report, police detectives in the future use a trio of semi-comatose psychics to alert them when people are about to commit murders and then arrest them before any crime has actually taken place, which is admittedly way easier than waiting for a crime to occur and then waste a lot of time trying to solve it. However, embittered anti-hero Detective John Anderton is pegged by the psychics for an upcoming murder, and rather than sit back and appreciate the irony of the situation, he goes on the run to try and clear his name, kidnapping one of the psychics in the process.

Anderton uncovers a murderous conspiracy in the process, revealing the flaws behind the "pre-crime" system of law enforcement. Anderton is cleared, pre-crime is disbanded, and he reunites with his estranged wife to make another child to replace their dead son.

Oh, and the psychics spend the rest of their days living peacefully in a cabin, reading books and shit.

Dreamworks/20th Century FoxDon't they already know all the endings, though?

The Horrific Aftermath:

As Anderton himself explains in the epilogue, the dissolution of the pre-crime department means that all prisoners arrested for pre-crimes will be pardoned and released. Now, every prisoner is kept in stasis, like Sylvester Stallone in Demolition Man, only without any rehabilitation programming getting zapped into their brains. This means that every single one of those prisoners is in the exact same emotional state as the day they were arrested for nearly committing murder.

Keep in mind, they never actually got around to killing anybody, so they're presumably still coursing with murderous fury. It's also a safe bet that they're all going to be fairly bitter over having been sealed in a prison tube for several years without ever having committed a crime. And the government just put them all back out on the streets at the same time.

Dreamworks/20th Century Fox"Sorry for the mix-up! You'll each be given a complementary handgun, to prove we trust you."

Anderton says the police will keep close watch on most of them, but check out that picture. That's a ton of wrongfully imprisoned people to keep track of, at least 70 percent of whom would've probably really murdered their intended victims had they not been busted by the psychic police force. The question at this point isn't whether or not they'll try to kill the same person (they almost certainly will). The question is, How many other people will they kill in their persecuted fury?

And the only thing stopping them will be a woefully inexperienced police force -- remember, at this point, the cops haven't dealt with a homicide in nearly 10 years, and now they suddenly have to monitor an overwhelming number of technically innocent but probably still dangerous inmates in addition to their regular duties. There's also the problem of all the other potential criminals who had been held in check by the pre-crime system. Now that there are no psychics and a limited police force spread entirely too thin, gangland killings and random crimes of passion are going to go through the roof. It's like clocking in for work at a pet store and realizing all the snake and spider tanks are empty.

Dreamworks/20th Century FoxWithout the psychics we'll be at the mercy of gun-toting maniacs like this guy!

The point is, thanks to the end of pre-crime, Washington, D.C. is about to see the biggest spike in murders in recorded history. They're going to have to immediately hire about 300 more police officers just to keep the city from imploding in a cloud of stab dust.